Talk about health

Few people can be immune from the current blaze of publicity and new-found political clarity about glogbal warming. The media is working overtime to bring us pictures and stories of just what it is doing to the climate. Wretched weather and extreme temperatures, blurring of seasonal changes and the misery caused by torrential rain or no rainat all. Great sections of the world population simply cannot cope.

It brings me to what you think you could or should do about it - if anything! At Heathrow Airport in London, protestors are trying to stop the building of a new runway. I don't imagine they will succeed, but stranger things have happened.

Their view is that we should take a long, hard look at our travel habits. In the UK many people fly all round the world for holidays and business. But, with computer technology and instant communications, is business travel really as essential as before? And as responsible citizens, should we fly quite so frequently just to spend a few days in the sun?

Or, and it's a big OR, should we spend millions of dollars trying to make travel more environmentally friendly? Can we invent or develop the means to travel without destroying the ozone layer or producing tons of carbon dioxide in the process?

Maybe we should be doing something in each direction - going back to holidaying nearer home, making air travel more costly so we can't afford to fly as often, finding efficient travel methods, removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and anything else we can think of.

Each option has its afficionados and detractors. But by working together an answer or conglomerate answer may come sooner than if everyone works alone.

Although this is not stricly a health problem, if we do nothing then all of our health problems will eventually go away as the earth dies!

I've chosen to hightlight this today because there are parallels to draw with health issues. Should we be preventing disease by trying to reverse the advances of the last century, namely going back to growing your own fruit and vegetables, and changing life style to how our parents lived?

OR do we accept where we are here and now, and try to adapt our current lifestyle given we eat the wrong food and don't exercise enough, and rely on the magic bullets of the pharmaceutical industry to treat all our man-made and lifestyle induced disease?

I suppose the answer is somewhere in between.

The problem is that, as I see it, it is much simpler to change our lifestyle to a less complex and more empirical existence. Stay at home more, appreciate the benefits of cultivating a few vegetables, exercise a little more and relax a bit, too. Then you'll avoid the worst the drug industry can throw at you by keeping well for longer.

We don't need to work 20 hours a day so we can afford four foreign holidays a year, a big house with low maintenance garden, a car for each adult, shopping as a hobby, child minders and nurseries for our children. It's a treadmill that we fall off - dead. Where's the enjoyment of this life - the only chance we get?

They're probably looking for the magic bullet for a long life right now. But, will you be around to take advantage of it?

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Wishing you the best of health.